[Malc-Y]

As I was driving the steam dumper in the above photograph, I feel that some explanation is required. This machine was built by David Philpot (sitting in the passenger seat in the photo) over a period of years starting about 12 years ago by assembling together from bits and pieces lying about in his yard. The chassis is a dumper truck chassis that was bought for £10 from a person who had bought the dumper for its Lister diesel engine and didn't need the rest of it. The engine is a Reeder of Nottingham economiser engine from a factory in Luton where it drove the soot scrapers on the tubes of the economiser (feed water heater) on a Lancashire boiler. It is a single cylinder piston valve machine with a bore and stroke of about 4" (we have never bothered to measure it precisely!) and drives the original dumper clutch and 3 speed and reverse gearbox via 3 V-belts. the boiler is a steam launch boiler built by Walter Gower of Bedford in 1965 to replace a life expired boiler at a cost of £65! excluding fittings. It has, if I remember correctly, about 118 1" diameter tubes and a working pressure of 100psi. there is no regulator between the boiler and engine, the speed being controlled and limited by a Pickering governor and use of the gearbox! The water tank at the rear is a standard domestic cold water tank obtained from a builders merchant and feeds the boiler by two injectors, one Penberthy and one Buffalo. The steering column and wheel are ex Ford Transit and the roof is from a milk float, the passenger seat was recovered from a skip! David has recently registed it for the road although we havn't taken it on the road yet as the maximum speed in top gear is about 5 mph (downhill!)
It is just a bit of fun and causes a lot of interest wherever we take it and we are always being asked "What did it do?" or "What is it?" and "What was it built for?"

Malc.